


Exhale Desire

by beelivia



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: (a little), Angst, Blood, Canon Typical Violence, Death, Eventual Smut, Hiatus, I hate myself a little for that one, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Sick Fic, Sickness, Unrequited Love, does this count as, enjoy, fuck or die trope, hanahaki, i'm gonna go with yes, mike: what is self care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-20 03:54:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14887127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beelivia/pseuds/beelivia
Summary: Mike is dying. He’s known it from the moment the first flower fell into his hands. His only hope for a cure is something that he simply cannot ask for, but with every passing day it gets worse. It doesn’t help that his fiancée doesn’t know that his unrequited love for a coworker is slowly killing him, or that said coworker is straight, catholic, and a man.Cover ArtFic and chapter titles from "Car Radio" by Twenty One Pilots





	1. I Have These Thoughts

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the new fic y'all! A forewarning that I don't respond to comments on Ao3 but I do see them and they make my day. If you want a response, send stuff to my tumblr and I'll respond within a few hours xx

“Third one since Wednesday. Dark brown hair, brown eyes, freckles, all cashiers. Definitely has a type,” Carisi says, handing Mike the new file. “And he left more flowers than last time. ME says that this guy maybe has a week to live unless he finds whoever he’s really after.”

More flowers. It seems like every day, there’s another case where the perp had Hanahaki. No one’s sure where the disease came from, but one day a few years ago, cases started cropping up in the city. Unrequited love makes flowers- cherry blossoms, he thinks- grow in parasitic bunches in the lungs of the sufferer. They spread to the heart, stomach, brain and blood. The longer it goes on, the more they take, and the more painful it gets. Coughing and throwing up brings the flowers, usually bloody, into the open air where they move on tendril roots like bugs as opposed to plants. Some of the top scientists in the world have been studying it, but no one’s figured out yet what it is or where it came from or how to protect yourself. It seems contagious, but only if the unrequited love already exists. Sometimes it just grows on its own. 

“We think the girl he’s looking for is either dead or out of the city. If he could get to her, he wouldn’t be chasing random girls down,” he adds.

Once it reaches the brain, they say there’s no hope. Like lesions, they inhibit impulse control and and rational thinking. Certain parts of the brain light up with increasing want until the victim can barely think about anything other than the love and affection of the object of their desires. From there, it’s always fatal. Usually the death is from complications- the immune system is too compromised to fend off an illness, or an absence of food, water, and/or sleep claim a wasted body. Too many times they’ve found an emaciated teenager in a puddle of their own blood on the floor of the school bathroom. 

“And there are still no matches in the database, not even familial?”

Someone in the higher ups decided that all Hanahaki crimes are to be delegated to SVU because it ‘seems up your alley.’ Most of the related ones are assaults that would have gone to them anyways. The one good part about it, if there is one, is the fact that any affected perp leaves their bloody flowers at the crime scene, where DNA can tie them to it and try to bring them to justice before their clock runs out. Mike gets chills down his spine just thinking about it.

“Nada. Fin’s pulling security footage from the latest vic’s apartment building, see if we find anything useful.”

“Let me know if anything comes up,” Mike says.

All these days on the job and it never gets easier. Rollins and Benson are with the victim now in the hospital, getting a statement while the memory is still fresh in her mind. While it’s protocol and it does make sense to get details before time fades them, Mike has heard enough victims who remember every detail for years like it’s still happening. Things like these are hard, impossible even, to get over. No matter how far it’s pushed, it has a tendency to crop back up alone in the dark when silhouettes dance through the windows. He doesn’t know what they’re going through. At the same time, however, he thinks he gets parts of it from the nights where he wakes up in a cold sweat from the memories of his time in Iraq. Whether or not the experiences are even close to comparable, he doesn’t know, but it’s the only way he can think to try and understand what they’re going through.

Like with the victims, he tries to empathize with the perps sometimes too. By getting into their head, he can get a lot better picture of where they are, where they’ll go, and what’ll make them break. It’s that skill that made him such a good interrogator, and a still phenomenal one now. No matter how much disgust it fills him with, he’s gotten good at melding his thoughts into those of the perp. The Hanahaki cases aren’t as hard as the others, usually, because he has a faint idea of what it’s like.

He looks across the room at where Carisi is bent over Fin’s desk, pointing at something on the screen and whispering about whatever it is that he sees. Carisi, while maybe not the most considerate or respected of the detectives, has something enthralling about him. Maybe it’s his thick Staten accent that coats his words in a heavy film. Or his boyish smile and dimples that he never grew out of. Or his bright blue eyes that sparkle when he’s excited or proud. Or his exaggerated gesturing with his long fingered hands when he talks. Or his slim-fitting three piece suits that are always perfectly tailored to his body. Or his brilliant laugh that fills a room. 

Mike shakes his head and looks away. He’s straight, and he has a fiancée, Alice. They’re happy together. The wedding isn’t any time soon, doesn’t need to be because they have their whole lives ahead of them to make it perfect. When the job weighs down on him, he can always go home to Alice and kiss her until he forgets.

The board in front of him is covered with pictures of the victims, police sketches, case notes and maps with red circles on them in thick marker. The perp they’re looking for is caucasian, with blonde hair, brown eyes, and a scar on his left wrist. He’s in his early twenties with a smooth, high pitched voice, and he’s always dressed like a businessman, down to his nice leather shoes that left clean size nine footprints in the dirt outside one victim’s apartments. Since he’s going after a specific type over and over with different victims, it’s likely that his love is for someone dead or unreachable. Based on the location of the victims’ jobs, the perp lives in downtown Manhattan. He’s not violent with the victims except for subduing them, and he commands them to tell him they love him. By described urgency of his voice and the amount of flowers left behind, they know he’s in the later stages of the disease. It wouldn’t be a shock if he dies before being caught, but Mike wants to think they can be faster than that. It would help if they had something, anything to go off of.

“Hey, Serge,” Fin calls. “We don’t have a face, but we have a license plate. The guy gets in and drives away, leaving a trail of flowers and blood on his way in.”

He glances over at Carisi and Fin. “Run it through the DMV and question the owner. Let me know what you find.”

“On it.”

On his way out, Carisi pulls on his long tan coat. It’s always been one that Mike likes on him, although he isn’t sure why. Probably because he wishes he could pull off a style like that, Normal length sport coats are more his style, even if they’re never as warm. He hones his attention in on the board again, willing it to give him a lead. Without the other detectives around, the precinct feels too quiet, which doesn’t help. When he was younger, silence helped him focus, but now it just makes him antsy.

He clears his throat to dispel a faint tickle, but it only makes it worse. Furrowing his brows, he does it again, but the tickle turns to an itch that he can barely breathe around. The sensation sends him into a coughing fit, so harsh he has to grip the edge of the table with white knuckles until whatever’s blocking his airway comes out onto his sleeve. His heart skips a beat at the sight of what’s come. A single delicate pink cherry blossom with a smear of blood on one of the petals rests against the charcoal fabric of his jacket. With a morbid curiosity, he picks it up and its pulsating roots curl around his fingers like tentacles in a grip that turns the skin pale, then dark with the lack of blood flow. It’s a struggle to peel it away and put it into the waste bin, where it slithers into the papers and out of sight.

That came out of him. It’s his. The first thing he thinks is that Alice doesn’t love him anymore, a thought that doesn’t even phase him, oddly enough. Next is that he can’t let anyone know about this. He doesn’t want the pity, the dismissal from his job, the care baskets and condescending questions of his well-being. This is probably going to kill him, and he wants to die with dignity as opposed to in a hospital bed with a bag of artificial happiness draining into his bloodstream. 

With those thoughts swimming in his conscience, he crosses his wrists behind his back and stares at the board.


	2. Sometimes Quiet is Violent

Before Fin and Carisi come back, but not long after Rollins and Benson do, Mike’s shift is over. He clocks out for the day to go home, only managing to produce one more flower before he gets into a cab to go back to the apartment. Alice is sweet, normal. She’ll make him forget about everything in the way that she always does. Warm dinner on the table with rich red wine, complimented by her still prim appearance from the work day, and the soft hum of the traffic outside while they eat. Her hand will cover his on top of the table, delicate fingers smoothing over his own. And afterwards, while they do the dishes, their hips will bump together and she’ll pull him into a loving kiss that eases away the horrors of the job.

That thought comforts him and keeps him alive on his way home from the precinct. He still doesn’t understand how he got the disease or why. He loves Alice. She loves him. They’re engaged. It doesn’t make sense that he’s in love with someone who doesn’t love him back. Nothing about this is comprehensible, and Mike doesn’t like puzzles he can’t solve. How could he have gotten the disease, anyways? He was so careful, never touching the flowers with bare hands or letting them too close to his face. It doesn’t make sense, and he’s dying. That part can’t register with him. After all, he’s still young and healthy and fit and not all ready for his life to be over. More than anything, he’s always hated two things: hospitals and pity. Once everyone knows that he’s sick, that’s going to become his new world and he can’t stand the idea of it.

The subway is a mess, as it so often is. Children with backpacks on their way home from extracurriculars, businessmen checking their watches, the usual suspects leering at everyone and making Mike subtly lift his coat to flash his badge and make them stop. In the corner, a young woman is curled up making awful retching sounds. Everyone keeps their distance from her, and he realizes why when he takes a step forward and sees the bloody drool and flowers spilling down her chest and crawling around her. Since he’s already contracted it, he has nothing to lose by comforting her in what’s very clearly one of her last moments. Dull, haunting eyes meet his as he approaches her shaking body.

“My name is Mike. What’s yours?”

“Rosa,” she croaks.

A particularly harsh cough spills more flowers all over her. She lets her head hit the wall of the subway car with a dull thud that makes Mike wince. Flowers skitter away from them and toward a homeless man who then tucks his legs closer to his body. No one here wants anything to do with the woman dying on the floor only a few feet away, unwilling to touch her when the contagion lives in her every cell. By now it has to be in her brain.

“You’re gonna be just fine, Rosa, I’ll take you to the hospital, and-”

“Don’t. I won’t make it.”

Rosa’s breathing gets heavier with every passing moment. Something, maybe compassion, maybe pity, has Mike drawing her close and cradling her weak body in his arms as she starts to shake. There’s nothing he can do, he knows that, but that doesn’t make it easier when more blood and flowers pour from her mouth from coughing and throwing up. A river of something beautiful, yet at the same time horrifying and sickening. The scent of it clogs his throat, gagging him, but he doesn’t let it show. She grabs onto his tie in a sickly hand painted by veins cutting paths in the papery skin.

Her chest convulses once, twice, and she’s still.

Even though he’s just met her moments ago, he wants to cry. She’s small in his arms, bloody as flowers leave her dead body that can no longer sustain them. People start freaking out and jumping onto the seats, voices babble into 911 dispatch because there’s a once sick and now dead woman on the train being held close to Mike’s chest. He can’t cry, can’t do anything but clear his throat of the angry tickle in it. While they all wait for help to arrive, he doesn’t let go of her because she died alone. 

Paramedics take her, offer Mike a shock blanket and a Hanahaki screening, but he declines and disappears into the crowd like his dark grey suit doesn’t have swatches and smears of her blood. He’ll never wear it again, whether he dies of the same affliction or not. Walking the rest of the way home, he feels cold clawing inside of him. Numbness, maybe, but not pain because he won’t allow himself to feel it. By the time he gets to his apartment, he’s schooled on a mask to hide the turmoil inside. His voice is almost fine when he announces his arrival, kicking off his shoes just inside the front door. Dinner smells like comfort, all spice and warmth.

“How was work today, babe?” Alice asks.

Her voice is pitched high like Rosa’s. Mike takes a deep breath.

“We have a lead on a case that’s been bothering us for a while. How ‘bout you, how was the studio?”

After stripping away and wadding up his jacket, he walks into the kitchen to toss it into the bin and come up behind Alice, wrapping his arms around her waist and tucking his chin over her shoulder. It’s nice to have the intimate contact, but it doesn’t bring the same spark it used to. The spark that’s been fading for a while, now that he thinks about it. At this exact moment, he suddenly knows. It’s not that Alice doesn’t love him. He must not love her, not anymore, if he ever did in the first place. That raises the question of who it is. Not Olivia, and not Amanda. He doesn’t talk to any other women. Mike turns his head to the side to kiss her neck and soothe himself with the ironic flowery scent of her perfume. She giggles and says his name in that bubbling voice of hers.

“Taste,” she says.

The spatula comes away the frying pan towards his face. Mike hums and opens his mouth to taste the potatoes she’s been cooking to go with what he’s pretty sure is steak searing in another pan to the side. He exaggerates a sound at the taste of it just to hear her laugh again. It’s that laugh, all through dinner and the rest of the evening, that keeps him calm and secretive. While he showers, he hears it over one of the sitcoms that she likes to fall asleep to. Sleepy in his ear when he joins her in bed and holds her body against hers. Waking him up because he didn’t hear his phone going off and she’s trying to get him alert enough to answer it.

“Dodds,” he drawls into the receiver.

“Sorry to wake you Sergeant, but it’s urgent. Our perp struck again. I’ll text you the address.” 

Carisi’s voice, as broken up as it is over the phone makes Mike’s cheeks warm. No, no this can’t be happening. Sure, he’s definitely taking a liking to the detective but that doesn’t mean he loves him or anything like that. This isn’t right. This isn’t fair. He suddenly has the urge to start coughing, but he suppresses it until he gets out of bed to get dressed and tell Alice that he has to run into work. She asks for a kiss before he goes, one he gladly gives. Carisi. Of all people, Carisi. A man. Mike is straight, thank you. A straight man. Carisi is also straight, no doubt. A smart man. It won’t take him long to figure out that something’s wrong, especially if Mike starts avoiding him. This will be a nightmare, already is.

He doesn’t bother with a tie as he hurries out of the couch, careful not to let a single flower fall until he leaves the apartment and it merely flutters to the pavement and scurries into the bushes. Parasites. His lip curls in disgust as he waits for his cab to arrive and take him to the station for his squad car, so he can reach the crime scene that he’s both dreading and wanting because Carisi will be there. 


	3. We're All Battling Fear

Mike ducks under the police tape into the scene that’s as much of a mess as his brain is. Flowers and broken glass make the carpet a work of art. The victim lies among the chaos, curled up and sobbing and flinching when Rollins reaches for her. Already, Carisi is taking notes of the scene and getting information from the unis on what they’ve found. He’s beautiful in the way tired people are, suit wrinkled from an overnight shift and hair a mess with the product having lost its hold from how much Carisi runs his hand through it when he’s stressed or has no energy. He looks like he should go home and sleep, something that Mike will tell him before they leave the crime scene. Instead of voicing it now, however, he approaches them and asks for details.

Carisi hands Mike his pad of hastily scribbled notes, fingers brushing his own in a way that makes something bloom in his chest. “Sophia Franchino, 23. Perp breaks in an hour ago, breaks the window on the way in,” Carisi says, narrating his notes aloud in a voice that can’t be anything but exhausted. “He begs her to love him, rapes her. This time face to face so he could see her. He finishes, starts throwing up, leaves her in the mess. We’re thinking it’s the same guy, the owner of the car from the last rape. His name’s Aaron Davis, no alibi, whereabouts unknown. Fin’s looking at security cams and we have unis canvassing the neighborhood.”

“Sounds like things are under control. I’ll take it from here, Detective, go home and get some rest.”

Something cold flits over Carisi’s face. “I caught wind of this, this is my case-”

“And you’ve been on duty since nine a.m. yesterday. Nothing personal, but you look dead on your feet,” Mike says.

For whatever reason, Carisi takes it personally anyways, expression dark as he leaves because no matter what he always listens to his supervisor. Mike feels like he should go after him. Instead, he thanks the uni and asks when the paramedics will be here to take the victim to the hospital for a rape kit. Her life is over, destroyed. He wishes he could approach her, but it’s unlikely that his added presence will make her open up. Just as Rollins gets a gloved hand on the victim’s shoulder to help her up, the EMTs come through the door with their stretcher and triage bag.

“I’ll ride along,” Rollins says.

She leads the victim away while Mike puts on crime scene gloves and looks around for evidence. No condom, like always. Flowers everywhere, which he’ll have to send to forensics. “Bag those up,” he says to the uni, gesturing at them. Most are completely soaked through with blood. He’s sure now that by the time they find Aaron Davis, he’ll be dead. That thought accompanies his phone ringing again, this time with Fin’s number. “Dodds.”

“We think we found our guy. He’s in bad shape, though, and there’s a bus for him on the way.”

“Call the lieutenant and get his DNA before we lose him,” Mike orders.

This crime scene is a mess. Everyone spread out, Carisi halfway home by now, Benson probably not even awake. And on top of it all, he can’t cough no matter how strong the urge gets because otherwise he’ll contaminate the evidence. He struggles to keep it together while the rest of the evidence is bagged, labeled and sent away.

By the time they’re done, Benson has messaged him to go join Rollins at the hospital, that she and Fin are with the perp, accompanied by Davis’ DMV photo. Now he can do something more useful, help someone, even though he spends most of the drive there choking on flowers. It doesn’t really hurt, is the strange thing, it’s just kind of uncomfortable. They keep falling into his lap and he has to crunch them up and shove them into the empty coffee cup by the center console. Luckily they’re just barely stained, not enough to ruin his suit or even make a noticeable stain. Thank God.

At the hospital, he parks and hurries into the ER. He has to wait at the desk and sign in before he’s let back, but once he is he sees Rollins gently rubbing the victim’s arm through her hospital gown while a nurse dabs at blood on her cheek.

“Miss?” he says in a quiet voice, making sure he’s in the victim’s line of sight. “I’m Sergeant Dodds with Manhattan SVU.”

“I’m S-Sophia,” she replies.

Mike has a vague memory of Sonny naming her, but it seems to have taken a back seat to the way Sonny looked. That has to be the disease talking. He forces himself to stop thinking about that and pulls out his phone for the photo of Davis. Handing her the phone, he crouches down to not seem so intimidating. 

“Sophia, is this the man who attacked you?”

She turns away and nods, tears coming back fresh on her face. No ID. After forwarding the good news to everyone, he stands back up and pulls Rollins away for a moment to let her know that they have the suspect in custody, but he’ll probably die before prosecution. He thinks that he’s glad a rapist won’t have a chance of going free, but he understands the catharsis a trial holds for the victims, how important a conviction is. They’ll never get that.

“You alright, Dodds?”

He blinks. “What?”

“You’re really pale, and you’re kinda zoning out,” Rollins says. “Everything okay?”

“Fine. But-” His phone ringing interrupts him. “Hello?”

Benson’s tinny voice informs him that the man they have in custody isn’t Davis, just a really sick bystander. In better light, his eyes are a different color, and he was running because he didn’t want his little girl to see him hurting. The tragic stories they show on the news, false arrests, they’ve hit SVU tonight. That man may not be able to say where his little girl is. Someone might not find her. Chances like that aren’t ones Mike likes to take.

“They don’t have Davis in custody. If you’ll excuse me for a moment, Detective.”

Once she leaves, Mike hurries down the corridor to the nearest bathroom and locks himself inside. His chest hurts. He falls to his knees in front of the toilet and starts coughing. Still uncomfortable, a sensation almost like throwing up but not quite. They don’t have the right guy, and that’s a failure that burns worse than being sick. He’s disappointed his detectives, his lieutenant, his father. They need to find Davis before he hurts anyone else. Mike chokes a little on a cough and out comes a clumpy mess that’s more blood than anything else He makes himself stand up on shaky legs to flush the toilet and splash his face with cold water. His cheeks are red, splotchy.

He emerges from the bathroom with a faint ache in the back of his throat and returns to Rollins and Sophia. Soon, she’ll be discharged to the care of her now present brother, only to come to the station in a few hours to make an official statement. Evidence will be tested, perp hopefully arrested, justice never fully obtained. Rollins offers to drive back to the precinct, thankfully, so Mike has the chance to sit in the passenger seat and pretend like he can’t feel the things moving inside of him. They won’t sit still. Scrambling over one another like his lungs are their beehive as opposed to an organic system keeping him alive for at least the time being.

Back at the station, Fin and Benson are looking at the evidence much like Mike did yesterday, but now Davis’ picture has been added to the forray on the pinboard. Their map is covered in scribbles, circles, lines, trying to figure out where Davis has gone or where he’ll be next.

“Has anyone seen Carisi?” Benson asks when Rollins and Mike approach with their styrofoam cup coffee. 

“I sent him home,” Mike says, “He worked a double and he was dead on his feet. Odds are he’s back in a few hours for his 9am shift.”

Just like that, they fall into the stunted rhythm of trying to be faster, smarter, better than an erratic man with little predictability. Every now and then Mike has to duck away for a coffee refill to disguise the coughing and choking on love that will never be returned no matter what he does. As the sun rises through yellowed windows, illuminating the dirty city and its fractured life, they make a breakthrough. All they have to wait on is Carisi to head the stakeout, since it was his case after all. That reminder makes Mike think about how upset he had been to be sent home. Thinking of that as a direct result of his own actions sends a pang of loss down his neck that adds fuel to the flowers’ fire.


	4. The end for now

This is currently on hiatus bc I’m having a lot of trouble writing it ++ there’s not much interest. Maybe I’ll come back to it another time but idk sorry! On my tumblr I’m taking suggestions for what to replace this with

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me on tumblr @space-carisi
> 
> Leave a comment and a kudos to make my day <3


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